It’s official Maine has just passed a net neutrality bill that will make it illegal for broadband operators in their state to degrade or prioritize one service over another. It’s interesting that most net neutrality bills are not saying that you -can’t- degrade service, just that if the pipe isn’t full you can’t degrade it.

Some arguments firmly place P2P in the headlights of the net neutrality bills, but it’s a service, one that does have some legitimate purposes. I’ve always been one to suggest that since HTTP takes up over 30% of the network stream, it should be blocked since P2P is often compared as using 50% .

The article stated above makes a very valid point by critiquing this statement from a vendor of a traffic shaping system:

“On commercial ISP networks peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing traffic can account for over half of all network bandwidth usage. Often, the transfers include large, copyrighted multimedia files such as videos and music, with a large proportion being sexually explicit in nature. “For municipal governments deploying public wireless networks, this traffic is problematic for a number of reasons. First, a single P2P user downloading a movie can ‘crowd out’ and slow down legitimate traffic such as email or web browsing. Secondly, municipalities must invest administrative resources to meet their legal responsibilities as a network service provider under Federal copyright law, including identifying and notifying users who are infringing copyrights. Lastly, the use of government-funded networks for the transfer of sexually explicit materials, some being illegal content such as child pornography, is especially problematic from a policy and public relations point of view.”

I’m shocked that while you wouldn’t want to ‘talk yourself out of a sale’, am I wrong to suggest that this list of open source movies is not a valid Internet browse? What if I wanted to download Elephants Dream and all the mirrors were no longer available?

One could suggest even, that if YouTube went P2P like I heard Joost was supposed to go,  local cable, dsl and wireless companies could rejoice: no Internet bandwidth is being used, only Intra net bandwidth. But then again, someone would say that’s a finite resource as well. I do agree it’s finite, but consumer’s patience for an ISP that doesn’t jerk the rug out from under them isn’t.

It’s not over yet, and Maine has just made the right choice in what will be a long line of states to hopefully follow.